The UPS market in India for the previous year has been flat. The Three-phase UPS market has seen a significant growth compared to Line Interactive and Single Phase UPS market which has been quite flat, informs Palash Nandy, Chief Commercial Officer, Numeric India in an interaction with Electrical India…

Please take through the journey of the company and its products & services in India.

Numeric, one of the top three UPS manufacturers in India, was established in the year 1984. The 1st UPS of Numeric was introduced in 1985. Since then it has evolved as the undisputed leader in Single Phase UPS and Line Interactive UPS in the last 24 years. In 2012, Numeric joined the Legrand Group.

Today, Numeric has a complete solution in UPS across Line Interactive, Online Single Phase, Three Phase and the latest generation modular UPS. This enables us to cater to any application from 600 VA to 1.2 MVA. Numeric products use state-of-the-art technology, are extremely user friendly and very easy to maintain. Over the years Numeric has also built the widest and largest service network in India. Today, the service network consists of 254 service centers across India. Close to 1200 people are dedicated in the service operations, of which, there are close to 900 field technicians. As a consequence, our customers are able to get proper service irrespective of their business location.

Being a part of the Legrand group now, Numeric gets access to the best in class technology worldwide and our experience in the market provides us fantastic market knowledge. We now proudly mention ourselves as a GLOCAL company- Global expertise and local knowledge.Some examples of how our products provide added value to customers:

• Modular UPS with Granular Parallel Architecture helps the customer to have more redundancy on the installed capacity. Help the customer to plan the capacity of the UPS as per their today’s requirement and gives flexibility to increase the rating of UPS as per their business growth. • KEOR T with its regenerative handling capability in mains mode is a unique feature, is suitable for both IT and industrial application. 3-level IGBT inverter design - helps to improve the overall efficiency to reduce the operation expenses. • Our 1 phase products (HP Max & Onfiniti) offers to our customer built in isolation transformer on a compact footprint. UPS with isolation transformer increases the reliability of the product and its performance for India market.

What is the USP of your products?

The biggest strength of Numeric is its ability to be at the cutting edge of UPS technology. Our technological prowess grew as we became a part of the Legrand group in 2002. This gave Numeric access to the global expertise of Legrand combines with our knowledge of the market, customers and the applications. Today, Numeric has the very latest technology in the UPS space. To give you an example, KeorT UPS by Numeric has the capability to handle and manage regenerative loads. These ranges of modular UPS by us are truly granular not only across the three phases but also within each phase. This allows the customers to scale up their UPS power as they grow their operations instead of investing in the whole setup right at the beginning. Energy efficiency is already one of the key drivers for us. Our products are the most energy efficient products in the Indian market. In fact some of our products have energy efficiency levels of upto 96%.

What kind of potential do you envisage for Indian Power sector with the government’s particular focus on upgrading overall infrastructure like roll out of 100 smart cities, commitment to provide 24*7 electricity to all?

Going ahead, we expect a steady growth in our industry. The factors driving the growth would be digitalization activities across sectors including GoI Digital India initiative, smart cities initiative, the need of clean power across industries, penetration of sensitive electronic gadgets in homes and hence the need for clean and uninterrupted power at home, various infrastructure projects, the growth of surveillance needs, distance education projects, digitalization of entertainment etc. We are very well placed to take advantage of this potential. With our wide product offer and the huge service infrastructure, we would be able to do justice to all the requirements of our customers. We aim to grow 2X compared to the market growth.

What are the bottlenecks that the company is facing while offering its services? What kind of support would you expect from the government?

Some of the challenges been faced by the industry are:

• Lack of standardization: We would like Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) to be more proactive in terms of ensuring that the products that are being sold in India adhere to the standards prescribed by BIS.• Volatility in the price of lead and the USD exchange rate: Lead is an important component and in the recent months, it has been extremely volatile. This affects the input costs and as a consequence the price and margin. Same is true for USD.• Some of the market segments have become extremely price sensitive. The only factor been considered is the price and not the value. Hence, a lot of cheap imports are coming in.• GST should be a great help in making the market better in terms of compliance. This should help all organized and professional manufactures like Numeric.• Major manufacturers like Numeric should play a more active role in educating or informing the market stakeholders about the technological changes and their benefits.

What measures would you suggest to overcome the problem of Import of Chinese equipment ?

We, at Numeric, are constantly engaged in maximizing value for our customers. Maximizing value in terms of technological advancement, customer friendliness in terms of product usage, installation, commissioning and after sales provide customers the right service back up. We do not believe in price competition. We are working hard to provide the best price Vs value proposition to our customers. We are also devoting our energy in providing our customers the best service (pre sales and post sales). That has been our strategy for quite some time and we have been very successful in implementing the same. In line with our objective of continuously upgrading of product offer, we will launch two new products in Three Phase UPS category in August.

The Government has up-scaled the target of renewable energy capacity to 175 GW by the year 2022 which includes 100 GW from solar, 60 GW from wind, 10 GW from bio-power and 5 GW from small hydro-power. Going ahead, what potential will it generate for the power segment?

This would obviously generate incremental business opportunities for the power segment. It would generate new business models. We already have products that are compatible with renewable energy sources like solar and wind. As part of the Legrand group, we are closely watching and contributing to developments that are happening in this space and would be ready with required products as and when the demand for the same would arise.

What is your outlook for the sector?

The UPS market in India for the previous year has been flat. The Three-phase UPS market has seen a significant growth compared to Line Interactive and Single Phase UPS market which has been quite flat. However, we expect a steady growth going ahead. Digitalization of activities across sectors including the GoI Digital India initiative, the smart city initiative, the need of clean power across industries, penetration of sensitive electronic gadgets and hence, the need for clean and uninterrupted power at home; various infrastructure projects, the growth of surveillance needs, distance education projects, digitalization of entertainment in homes, growth in the healthcare segment are some of the factors driving the growth.